The 10 most-cited articles in Journal of American History, 2022

Between 1902 and 1934 the United States committed hundreds of Native people to the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians in South Dakota. There, men and women from dozens of Native nations experienced forced detention, long-term or even permanent removal from families and communities, exploitation of their labor, and sometimes physical and sexual violence. It is a grim story. Yet, Susan Burch emphasizes the patients' initiatives to push back and their kin's commitment to supporting these efforts. She also chronicles families' heart-rending efforts to assert and restore the humanity of the incarcerated and to remember them, to this day. What happened at the Canton asylum was in keeping with the U.S. goal of eradicating Native peoples' cultures during the early twentieth century. Linkages to the pathologies of boarding schools, orphanages, and prison hospitals are profound, but the people forcibly sent to the asylum seemed even more oppressed. For many, there was no way out. No escape. They died there. It could be considered the perfect metaphor for the most destructive, cruel policies of…

In this book, noted historian Eric Foner describes the constitutional transformation wrought by the Reconstruction amendments, which include: the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude; the Fourteenth Amendment, which established birthright citizenship, established federal rights enforceable against state governments and rules governing the political structure of the nation as it re-admitted the rebellious states; and the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibited the denial of the right to vote based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Foner argues that the Reconstruction amendments “forged a new constitutional relationship between individual Americans and the national state and were crucial in creating the world's first biracial democracy” (p. xx). Battles over the extent of that transformation continue today, not only in U.S. courts but also in the nation's political culture. In this concise and tightly written book, Foner describes the historical context in which each amendment was adopted, the debates over the amendments, and the…

In The Chinese Question, Mae Ngai offers a beautifully written and deeply engaging study of the legacies of the gold rushes that began in the middle of the nineteenth century. Their impact extended to migrations; globalization of trade; racial constructions; and political relations between importers and exporters of gold, goods, and labor. She focuses on the United States, China under the Qing dynasty, and England and its Australian and South African colonies. In these places, Chinese labor (regardless of status or condition) was deemed unfree, linked to slavery, and opposed; this is the “coolie myth” that consolidated during the period under investigation. The myth led to policies of exclusion or expulsion and views that the Chinese could not belong in the West. Prior to completing this superb book, Ngai was probably best known for Impossible Subjects (2014), an examination of the quota era (1920s–1965) in U.S. immigration politics of racialized exclusion and the construction of the “alien citizen”—citizens on paper who are treated as not belonging. The Chinese Question ranges…

Despite the inexplicable title, To Make Their Own Way in the World is a weighty examination of fifteen extraordinary daguerreotypes of men and women of African descent who were enslaved in South Carolina. Joseph T. Zealy photographed Alfred, Delia, Drana, Fassena, Jack, Jem, and Renty, stripped naked, for the Harvard College professor Louis Agassiz in 1850, to support Agassiz's racist theory of polygenesis. Since their rediscovery in 1976, the haunting images have disturbed and challenged viewers worldwide. This multidisciplinary compilation of trailblazing essays frames the daguerreotypes as works of urgent engagement. The beautifully designed volume features color reproductions—open cases with handwritten labels pinned to red velvet pads facing close-ups of the indelible daguerreotypes of startling clarity in brass mats. In part 1, “Photographic Subjects,” Molly Rogers explains debates about original diversity versus original unity in the “American school of ethnology.” Gregg Hecimovich adroitly fleshes out the life and times of the seven sitters. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham…

Catherine S. Ramírez's Assimilation provides a significant intervention in how we theorize and define assimilation and understand its impact in the United States' past and present. Traditionally, assimilation has been associated with immigration in the sense that immigrants, over multiple generations, integrate themselves into mainstream society, navigating various linguistic, cultural, and citizenship boundaries. Drawing from an array of primary sources and wide-ranging multidisciplinary scholarship, Ramírez makes two significant interventions to our understanding of assimilation. First, she “decouples” assimilation from immigration and excavates its relationship to racialization, examining what it has meant for nonimmigrant people of color. Second, Ramírez characterizes assimilation as a paradox and defines it as a relational process “whereby the boundary between unequal groups and between inside and outside blurs, disappears, or, paradoxically, is reinforced” (p. 15). Throughout the text, Ramírez demonstrates that these boundaries fade enough for those deemed alien citizens and…

Kevin Mattson delivers an absorbing story about an American counterculture, but not the one in all the hippie retrospectives. This culture, the world of 1980s American punk, is distinct from—even counter to—the 1960s counterculture in its particular disaffection and commitment to create a social alternative to mainstream American society. We're Not Here to Entertain spans the opening of the so-called “age of Reagan,” which brought us our first “entertainer in chief,” war games, and Mtv. As Mattson explains, corporations trafficked in “cool,” and government trafficked in war—often working together. Against this backdrop, Mattson traces the rise of a hardcore punk scene—younger, more subversive, and more suburban than its predecessor. As urban punk bands of the 1970s, such as the Sex Pistols and Blondie, either overdosed or went pop, hardcore bands such as Minor Threat, TSOL (True Sounds of Liberty), and MDC (Millions of Dead Cops) became the driving force of a new punk world, powered by the exchange of ideas, music, and art through a true do-it-yourself cultural economy. The world…

Border crossing plays a significant role in the relationship between the modern United States and Mexico, a daily reminder that the two nations share a deeply intertwined present. Nowadays, most border crossers head from south to north, hoping to find in the United States freedom from want, crime, and instability. Illustrating the influence of border crossing on domestic politics, fear of these freedom seekers in the United States has recently contributed to a surge in populist nationalism elevating partisan and sectional rancor to an intensity not felt since the Civil War. In the mid-nineteenth century, border-crossing freedom seekers contributed to seismic shifts in the domestic politics of both nations. During the earlier era, however, freedom seekers were African American fugitives from enslavement, headed south to Mexico. The furor they helped foment culminated in the Civil War and the end of slavery in the United States. As is often the case with trade books, portions of South to Freedom will be familiar to scholars. Even so, Alice L. Baumgartner's beautifully written,…

The Shadow of El Centro excavates a forgotten account of immigrant detention in southern California. By leveraging source material from Mexico City and Washington, D.C., Jessica Ordaz supplements what would have been a less complete picture contained in records across the U.S. Southwest. The book argues that El Centro Immigration Detention Camp—which opened in 1945 in Imperial Valley and lasted, in one form or another, until 2014—represents a lasting and influential source of legal violence. The metaphor of hauntings ties together the book's narrative. Readers learn about the troubled roots of a detention center built far enough away from prying eyes. Functioning largely in the dark and with limited oversight, the detention camp staff routinely tested the limits of power over detainees' lives and labor, especially through violence and abuse carried out in liminal spaces within its walls. Ordaz deliberately uses the language of imprisonment to describe detention conditions because, although immigrant detention formally falls outside of the criminal justice system, El Centro bore…

In 1660, with Charles II posed to return to England to take his late father's position as king of England, Scotland, and Ireland, the two men who signed Charles I's death warrant, William Goffe and Edward Whalley, sailed for Massachusetts Bay Colony. In New England, these regicides were feted, housed, and—once the newly restored monarchy sought to track them down—hidden from Crown officers. They lived out their lives in hiding in New Haven, Connecticut, and especially in the remote Massachusetts town of Hadley. Whalley probably died in 1675, and Goffe in 1679 or 1680. The two are remembered in connection with the cave in which they once hid, but especially for the reappearance of Goffe—as the “angel of Hadley”—who purportedly rallied the Hadley townsfolk during King Philip's War (1675–1676) (p. 70). The legend of Goffe's providential appearance would be memorialized in visual images, novels, and plays. Matthew Jenkinson's book contributes to our understanding of the remembrances of these regicides. The work opens with a brief preface recounting a twenty-first-century visit to the…

Comic books—or at least their superhero progeny—have achieved cultural hegemony in the twenty-first-century United States. Their box-office dominance is relatively recent, but scholars have been at work for some time exploring what comic books might teach us about Americans and their past. Much of this burgeoning field has focused on biographies of creators, institutional histories, and cultural readings. Paul S. Hirsch complements such studies by connecting comics to the international arena. Pulp Empire argues that comic books can teach us about the intersections between culture, capitalism, imperialism, and prevailing racial attitudes during and after World War II. The result is layered and complex, suggesting new ways to think about American foreign policy making as well as comics. The first half of Pulp Empire relates stories not totally unfamiliar to comic book scholars in analyzing wartime and early postwar comics: their wartime violence, misogyny, and racism; the postwar atomic anxiety; and the anticomics crusade. But Hirsch takes such materials and repurposes them by…